meeting again. A smiling bumper to a sad parting, and let us all be unhappy together. "Mr. Cypress (filling a bumper).-This is the only social habit that the disappointed spirit never unlearns.

"The Reverend Mr. Larynx (filling).-It is the only piece of academical learning that the finished educatee retains.

"Mr. Flosky (filling).—It is the only objective fact which the sceptic can realize.

"Scythrop (filling).—It is the only styptic for a bleeding heart.

"The Honourable Mr. Listless (filling).—It is the only trouble that is very well worth taking.

"Mr. Toobad (filling).—It is the only antidote to the great wrath of the devil.

"Mr. Hilary (filling).—It is the only symbol of perfect life. The inscription, 'Hic non bibitur" will suit nothing but a tombstone.

"Mr. Glowry.-You will see many fine old ruins, Mr. Cypress, many reminiscences of the ancient world, which I hope was better worth living in than the modern; though for myself I care not a straw more for one than the other, and would not go twenty miles to see anything that either could show.

"Mr. Cypress.-It is something to seek, Mr. Glowry. The mind is restless, and must persist in seeking, though to find is to be disappointed. Do you feel no aspirations towards the countries of Socrates and Cicero? No wish to wander among the venerable remains of the greatness that has passed for ever?

"Mr. Glowry.-Not a grain.

Scythrop.-I should have no pleasure in visiting countries that are past all hope of regeneration. There is great hope of our own; and it seems to me that an Englishman who, either by his station in society or his genius, or (as in your instance, Mr. Cypress) by both, has the power of essentially serving his country in its arduous struggle with its domestic enemies, yet forsakes his country, which is still so rich in hope, to dwell in others which are only fertile in the ruins of memory, does what none of those ancients, whose fragmentary memorials you venerate, would have done in similar cir

cumstances.

"Mr. Cypress.-Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife, and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country. I have written an ode to tell the people as much, and they may take it as they list.

"Mr. Hilary.—I am one of those who cannot see the good that is to result from all this mystifying and blue-devilling of society. The contrast it presents to the cheerful and solid wisdom of antiquity is too forcible not to strike any one who has the least knowledge of classical literature. To represent vice and misery as the necessary accompaniments of genius is as mischievous as it is false, and the feeling is as unclassical as the language in which it is usually expressed.

"Mr. Toobad.-It is our calamity. The devil has come among us, and has begun by tak ing possession of all the cleverest fellows.

"Mr. Cypress.-There is no worth or beauty but in the mind's idea. Love sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind. The sum of our social destiny is to inflict or endure.

"Mr. Hilary.-Rather to bear and forbear, Mr. Cypress,-a maxim which you perhaps despise.

“Mr. Cypress.--Love is not an inhabitant of the earth. We worship him as the Athenians did their unknown God. But broken hearts are the martyrs of his faith, and the eye shall never see the form which phantasy paints, and which passion pursues through paths of delusive beauty, among flowers whose odours are agonies, and trees whose gums are poison.

"Mr. Hilary.-You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.

"Mr. Glowry.-Let us all be unhappy together!"

"Night

The reader who does not relish the cheerful vigour, the clearness, the fine sparkling salt of passages like this, which is, after all, only an average specimen of Peacock's manner, must have spoiled his palate by indulging in mawkish twaddle of one kind and another, or damaged his appetite by neglecting to take regular exercise on the hills of Attica and the banks of the Tiber. mare Abbey was followed, in 1822, by "Maid Marian" in which Peacock goes back to the Robin Hood days, and carries his wit into the feudal forests, but which is chiefly remarkable for the freshness and grace with which he touches on silvan scenery, a kind of scenery dear to him (as already hinted) from a boy. To " Maid Marian" succeeded in the same year" Crotchet Castle," another story of his more usual type, but where a new class of the humours of the time were selected for pungent exposition and genial banter. One of his best scholarly parsons, Dr. Folliott, is in "Crotchet Castle," and says and eats many a good thing in the course of it; but we must not overload our pages with quotations. We must be content only to mention "Melincourt," one of the most daring of all his fictions, in which, with Aristophanic boldness, he has introduced a Sir Oron Haut-ton, who is nothing but

a well-trained ape, into good society as a living character, and has even made him be elected to Parliament for a borough. "Melincourt" re-apeared in a cheap form in 1856.

It is now time to relate that Peacock, who had in 1809 gone to Flushing as undersecretary to Sir Home Popham, was in 1819 appointed to a situation in the "Examiner's Office at the India House. He had six

There is a tenderness at the bottom of the playfulness of this, which reveals itself more and more after repeated perusals; while the simplicity and grace of its execution are truly admirable. We doubt if there is any single poem of Praed's equal to it, justly as Praed's talent for poetry of a similar kind is admired.

Some of the literary criticism in "Gryll Grange" is very valuable, and might be studied with advantage by our younger poets and critics. How much truth and suggestiveness there is in the dialogue which follows:

"Miss Ilex.-Truth to nature is essential to poetry. Few may perceive an inaccuracy: but to those who do, it causes a great diminution, if not a total destruction, of pleasure in the perusal. Shakespeare never makes a flower blossom out of season. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey are true to nature, in this and in all other respects: even in their wildest imaginings.

"The Reverend Doctor Opimian.-Yet here is a combination, by one of our greatest poets, of flowers that never blossom in the same

And every flower that sad embroidery wears: Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffodillies fill their cups with tears, To deck the laureat hearse where Lycid lies." And at the same time he plucks the berries of the myrtle and the ivy.

“Miss Ilex.-Very beautiful if not true to English seasons: but Milton might have thought himself justified in making this combination in Arcadia. Generally he is strictly accurate, to a degree that is in itself a beauty. For instance, in his address to the nightingale :

"Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among, I woo to hear thy even-song, And missing thee, I walk unseen, On the dry smooth-shaven green." The song of the nightingale ceases about the time that the grass is mown.

"The Reverend Doctor Opimian.-The old Greek poetry is always true to nature, and will bear any degree of critical analysis. I must say, I take no pleasure in poetry that will

"Mr. Macborrowdale.-I should take it to be a description of the Queen of Bambo.

"The Reverend Doctor Opimian.-Yet thus one of our most popular poets describes Cleoillustrated the description by a portrait of a patra; and one of our most popular artists has hideous grinning Ethiop. Moore led the way to this perversion by demonstrating, that the Egyptian women must have been beautiful, because they were 'the countrywomen of Cleopatra.' Here we have a sort of counterdemonstration, that Cleopatra must have been a fright, because she was the countrywoman of the Egyptians. But Cleopatra was a Greek, the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes and a lady of Pontus. The Ptolemies were Greeks, and whoever will look at their genealogy, their coins, and their medals, will see how carefully they kept their pure Greek blood uncontaminated by African intermixture. Think of this description and this picture, applied to one who, Dio says-and all antiquity confirms him—was the most superlatively beautiful of women, For splendid to see, and delightful to hear." she was eminently accomplished: she spoke many languages with grace and facility. Her There is not a shadow of intellectual expresmind was as wonderful as her personal beauty. sion in that horrible portrait."

and

The interesting question thus mooted about Cleopatra demands, and would reward, a special dissertation. Here, we must be content to say, first, that it was not Moore, but Shakespeare, who "led the way to what Peacock calls the "perversion" of making Cleopatra an Ethiop. Shakespeare speaks of her as "a gipsy," without any warrant from his original authority for "Antony and Cleopatra, "-Plutarch. Secondly, we must remark, that we wish the genealogy" were more satisfactory. There is bastardy and obscurity, or both, at both ends of it! Ptolemy Auletes, the father of Cleopatra, was certainly spurious; Cicero says in one of his Orations, that it was universally agreed that he was neither royal in race nor character: "Eum ... neque genere, neque animo regio esse, inter omnes video convenire.'* Granting, however, that he was the son of Ptolemy Soter, and thus seventh in descent from Ptolemy son of Lagus, the founder of the house,— who was Lagus? He is sometimes called a bastard of the Royal house of Macedon, and if So, he was certainly of Hellenic descent, for they established their Hellenic descent before being allowed to compete at the Olympic Games. But if, on the other hand, Lagus was a Macedonian, he was a "barbarian; and in either case, who is to answer for the "purity" of the Greek blood of the

*Cicero, De Lege Agraria, Or. ii. 16. See A. W. Zumpt's edition of these Orations, and his notes in loc. (Berlin, 1861.)

mothers either of the first Ptolemy, or the last? Thirdly, while unprepared to deal adequately with the "coins," we may mention that we once broached this very point to the late distinguished and lamented Professor Ramsay, of Glasgow, and that he immediately produced some silver coins, in which Cleopatra had anything but the true classic outline which Peacock claimed for her. At the same time, we commit our selves to neither theory, but reserve the question ad avizandum. It will be a curious thing if the physical colour of Queen Cleopatra should remain in controversy for ever, like the moral colour of Queen Mary! After what has been quoted from Peacock, and said about him, the reader will readily believe that he was an old-fashioned scholar, and gentleman of the old school to the last. Such was indeed the case. He told Mr. Thackeray, to whom we were indebted for the anecdote, that he now read nothing but Greek. He was heretical on the subject of Tennyson, and living poets generally. His favourite wine was Madeira. He consorted chiefly, out of his own private circle, with men of the past,-dining, we believe, nowhere except now and then at Lord Broughton's. He lived, as we have said before, near the Thames, and delighted in going on its waters; and he cherished an intention-never, unfortunately, carried out -of editing Sophocles. In these simple old-world pursuits he passed a vigorous old age; and his portrait now before us by Mr. Wallis, shows us a veteran with a fine massive brow, crowned with white hair, strong regular features, and a rather large mouth, instinct with character, the whole tinged with the reddish tints of a lusty English autumn. He died at Shepperton, near his favourite river, early in the present twelvemonth, having reached his eighty-first year.

Francis Mahony, Father Prout, the last of our little group of humorists, was born at Cork in the beginning of the century-we believe about 1804. Aytoun confined himself to Scotland with a tenacity that in our age exposed him to provincialism. He sometimes went to a German bath, or to Paris, or London, but even London was to him a kind of foreign city; and in spite of the demonstrative Bohemianism of his comic writings, it was easy to see that he lived under the dominion of the local traditions of "genteel" Edinburgh life. Peacock was a Londoner, whose heart, as we have said, clung to the Thames, and whose very scholarship was of purely English type, not borrowed, like too much of our modern scholarship, from the Germans. But Mahony, though intellectually an Irishman to

the backbone, was, compared with these men, essentially cosmopolitan. He was as much at home in Rome as in London; in Paris as at Florence; and led a life resem bling that of the men of letters of the six teenth century rather than of those of to day. Latin, he knew, not as it is known at schools and colleges only, but with the familiarity with which it was known to the Erasmuses and Buchanans: and he had a range of reading about the men of those times, which might be matched, perhaps, among a small circle of inquirers, but which certainly nobody else combined, as he combined it, with the wit and shrewdness, and experience, and popular talent of a successful journalist and magazinist. The secret of all this was his education on the Continent among the Jesuits. In early youth he was destined for the order, and went through their curriculum in Belgium, France and Rome. When he was still young, his talents must have attracted attention among their enemies, for in the Jésuites Modernes of the Abbé de la Roche Arnaud, a book published against them in Paris in 1826, when they were thriving under the sceptre of Charles Dix, a special article is devoted to "O'Mahoni, né en Irlande." "Je ne sais," the Abbé tells us, "s'il est parent du Comte de ce nom; mais à l'esprit, aux préjugés, et aux systèmes de M. le Comte, il ajoute le fanatisme, la dissimulation, la politique et tout le caractère d'un Jésuite.... S'il était confesseur de notre bon Roi, il ferait de magnifiques auto-da-fé.. La Compagnie destine le P. O'Mahoni à être à la tête des congrégations et des colléges. Elle lui fait, pour cela, connaitre à fond les sciences diverses de la société, . . . et l'on espère que docile aux leçons de ses maitres, le jeune O'Mahoni deviendra plus insensible et plus cruel encore que les inquisiteurs les plus endurcis de Saragosse et de Valence." Prout used to be prodigiously tickled by this account of himself and of his probable development; and his copy of the Abbé Roche Arnaud's book is now before us, with the following inscription in his own writing: "Handed over with great gusto to my biographer and friend, at Paris, Rue des Moulins, 1865, Aug. 12th. Frank Mahony de Saragosse." The truth is, that like many others, of whom the great Erasmus is the highest type, Mahony was a man of letters by nature, and a priest only by accident. There was a time in Europe when the two vocations were one; but we are drifting further from that tradition_every day; and Mahony's transition from Jesuitism into literature was only one sign out of many of a movement going on all over the

world. Nevertheless, when he threw himself on London, and became a Fraseriancirca 1835,-his ecclesiastical education determined the form which his literary work took. He embodied himself in an imaginary "Father Prout" of Watergrasshill, near Cork, a priest of the old school, and attributed all his writings to that fictitious personage, whose name came to be familiar ly applied to him, even in conversation. "He was one of that race of priests" such is Mahony's description-"now, unfortunately, extinct, or nearly so, like the old breed of wolf-dogs in the island. I allude

to those of his order who were educated abroad before the French Revolution, and had imbibed, from associating with the polished and high-born clergy of the old Gallican Church, a loftier range of thought, and a superior delicacy of sentiment." This sentence is the key to much that was very characteristic in Mahony. He had strong sympathy with the aristocracies, both of birth and letters-with historical families, and with writers whose genius was enriched by learning; and he did not like the upstarts of either world. But he was, above all, a humorist; and hence, in the "Reliques of Father Prout," all his gifts and acquirements run to humour. And it is humour thoroughly Irish,-in its brilliance, its extravagance, and its waywardness of fanciful epigram;-a kind of practical joking in literature, as if he pulled a curule chair from under you just when you were going to sit down, or put Attic garlic into your omelette when your back was turned. To what else shall we compare a writer's telling us, in the "Rogueries of Tom Moore," that Tom stole his "Lesbia hath a Beaming Eye" from "an old Latin song of my own, which I made when a boy, smitten with the charms of an Irish milk-maid?" and gravely proceeding to produce the "original:

"Lesbia semper hinc et inde

Oculorum tela movet,
Captat omnes, sed deinde

Quis ametur nemo novit.
Palpebrarum, Nora cara

Lux tuarum non est foris,
Flamma micat ibi rara

Sed sinceri lux amoris
Nora Creina sit regina
Vultu, gressu tam modesto,
Hæc puellas inter bellas

Jure omnium dux esto.

"Lesbia vestes auro graves

Fert et gemmis juxta normam, Gratiæ sed eheu suaves

Cinctam reliquere formam.

Nora tunicam præferres,

Flante zephyro volantem;

Oculis et raptis erres Contemplando ambulantem! Veste Nora tam decora Semper indui memento, Semper puræ sic naturæ

Ibis tecta vestimento."

These comic translations were quite a fashion at that time, and were executed chiefly by clever Irishmen, such as Mahony, Maginn, Sheehan and Kenealy-the two last of whom still survive. Mahony's serious Latin verse, however, was very spirited, as his ode on Loyola - two stanzas of which may be repeated - shows:

"Tellus gigantis sentit iter: simul
Idola nutant, fana ruunt, micat

Christi triumphantis trophæum
Cruxque novos numerat clientes.
Videre gentes Xaverii jubar
Igni corusco nubila dividens:
Capitque mirans Christianos

Per medios fluitare Ganges."

This ode is in Prout's paper on "Literature and the Jesuits "an admirable summary of the services of the order to the cause of letters. He had always a kindness for them from that point of view, though he maintained that they were steadily deteriorating in brains and scholarship, and he loved to trot out a forgotten father when the occasion offered. "What are you doing?" he asked a literary friend one day in the Strand. "A curious thing," was the answer, "an article on The Beard." "Ab,” said Prout, "Laurence Beyerlinck, Magnum Theatrum Vita Humana - article barba!” The hint was taken, and proved a most valuable one; but the question was naturally put to Prout by his friend next time they met, "Who was Beyerlinck?" "A Low Countries Jesuit," Prout answered; one of the old fellows that you Protestants are always running down; and his eye gave a mischievous twinkle of pleasure. As may be supposed, the Father was a picturesque figure in his ecclesiastical garb for he always retained it, more or less- among London journalists. He was esteemed for his reading, and might be consulted about most subjects; for you found him over the "Menagiana," or Erasmus, or Buchanan, in regions where the ordinary Cockney litterateur (whom he held cheap) is wholly at sea. But his chief impression was made by his wit and humour. He could stand up against the epigrammatic needle-gun of Douglas Jerrold; he was full of all sorts of anecdotes; and he had a great deal of curious gossip about known people- especially countrymen of his own which he gave out fla